Wireless listening, noise cancellation, cushions that wrap snugly around your ears ... there are a few balls to juggle when building flagship headphones these days, and Bang & Olufsen has just revealed its first attempt at squeezing these three into the one set of premium cans, the Beoplay H9 over-ear headphones.
If you feel like you've seen these headphones somewhere before, then in a way, you're not mistaken. The H9s appear pretty much identical to the H7s released last year, at least on the outside, with ear cushions consisting of the same memory foam wrapped in the same lambskin coating, built onto the same lightweight aluminum frame.
Like their predecessors, they also feature 40-mm electro-dynamic drivers delivering sound over a 20 Hz to 20 kHz frequency range. Wireless listening is offered through Bluetooth 4.2 with support for aptX and AAC codecs, powered by the same 770-mAh swappable battery, and there's an audio cable included for when you run out of juice.
Where the H7s offered 20 hours of wireless listening and no noise cancellation, the H9s will run up to 16 hours, or 14 hours with active noise cancellation switched on. This can be activated through a vertical swipe of the touch interface on the outside of the right ear cup, and uses microphones to collect ambient noise and drown it out with opposing signals.
The touch interface, a feature also seen on the H7s, also allows calls to be taken and music to be paused with a single tap, and functions as a virtual volume wheel when you run a finger around its circumference. This is said to even work with gloves.
The H9s come in two colors, black and a creamy "Argilla Grey," and with a recommended retail price of US$499. They are available now through Bang & Olufsen's site below.
Source: Bang & Olufsen